Here in tropical Mazatlán, things get done in different ways than up in the rigid frigid northlands, but, despite overwhelming anecdotal evidence to the contrary, they do get done. Usually. Eventually. It has taken over eight years and dozens of disgruntled workers to get our house to its present advanced state of incompletion, but it’s getting there. I expected this. I’d been warned, and like many of my fellow Norteamericanos, I came here suffering from the misconception that the native lifestyle would be laid back and relaxed, which it is on the beach, but that’s an illusion. You won’t find many locals on the beaches unless they are working the tourists. Here they believe in a six-day workweek, at least in theory. And nobody takes a siesta! If a business is closed for an hour or two in the mid-afternoon, it’s not because it’s nap time, it’s so the employees can go home, eat the big meal of the day, and get back to work for a few more hours. Our son’s primaria teacher endures him and his classmates from 8:00am til 12:30pm, then she grabs a taco and goes across the street to another school for the late shift. My on-call safari driver works 12 hours a day, six days a week, including Christmas and any other holidays he can. If his replacement can’t make it, he drives on his time off. And I don’t know how the waiters in this town manage to smile and act so happy all the time, considering the hours they put in and everything (and everyone) they put up with. The big exception to all these dedicated hardworking folks, it seems, is the maverick independent contractor who promises to do a renovation job on your particular home or business by such and such a date for a special bargain price. Here’s some free advice: don’t make any life-or-death plans that revolve around the work being completed by the stated deadline. Not that this spottiness in the attendance department is a strictly regional phenomenon. Some of my old hometown drinking buddies were golf-addicted

roofers who at the rare sight of sunshine or even a lull in the rains would drop their tools and take nine. Some freelance housepainters, landscapers, carpet layers and cabinetmakers I knew from Prairie Tavern would often set their own flaky, that is, flexible hours and their own maddeningly capricious pace, working around their own whimsical schedules whenever they felt damned good and ready. But I never had to deal with them professionally up there like I have down here, where I regularly go into states of advanced nervousness watching our home go sporadically up and up while the calenders fly by. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but for some stubborn irrational reason if a workman says he will be at my house at 8:30am, I believe him. Or at least I feel committed to being there myself at the agreed upon time, and waiting around until he gets there. Of course, my wife who hires, instructs, supervises and pays the parade of carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, etc, knows the routine. The trick is to not be there, either, when you’re supposed to meet. She contracts a crew, but doesn’t tell me what exactly they’re supposed to do. Then, as the appointed hour approaches, she says she’s going to dash over to her mother’s house down the hill for a few minutes. En route, she spontaneously decides to catch a bus to her sister’s in town, where she spends a few hours downloading vitally urgent information from the internet. Clairvoyantly, the handymen do not appear. How did they know? Meanwhile, I pass the morning wondering what to tell them when they arrive any minute. Then, as I am burning the kids’ hot dogs and trying to find the ketchup and generally going out of my mind with stress, Sra Brady arrives with a bag of chicken tamales and a pasta salad. Two days later, the guys show up, and miraculously she’s there and orders them to start chiseling out a space for a closet I didn’t even know we needed. After a few suspenseful weeks of intermittent noise, dust and delays, they’re done. You see? It all works out.